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Attn: Raid5 gurus wanted!!!

J

joecool234

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 1, 2001
Messages
433
Ok, I just purchased one of the Dell PE SC420 for like $230. Now I'm ready to raid5 her up. I'm almost positive that I will settle for the Promise SX4 as a controller. As for the hard drives...all I can afford right now is 3 Hitachi 7k250s. After I get my tax refund I will buy 2 more (1 to expand the array, and one as a spare). Four 250GB drives in raid5 will get me roughly .75TB. My question to the gurus is as follows:

Can the drives in a raid5 array be upgraded to larger drives without having to lose any data? Is it possible for me to replace one drive at a time with 400GB drives, and rebuilding the array each time? If I do this, will the array see 1.2TB once all drives have been replaced? Or with raid5, do I have to simply increase the number of drives to increase space?

Also, does anyone know how the performance of the SX4 changes with cache size?

Any and all help with be greatly appreciated.
 
I dont believe that'll work, There maybe some "magic program" out there or maybe you could expand a partition but I'd think that you would need to back it up and rebuild the array with the 250's
 
If you remove a 250 GB drive and replace it with a 400 GB drive, the controller should add it to the array as a 250 GB drive. These drives will continue to be 250 GB even if all the drives in the array have been switched to 400 GB. The easiest way to expand your array will be to add additional drives.
 
slowbiznatch said:
If you remove a 250 GB drive and replace it with a 400 GB drive, the controller should add it to the array as a 250 GB drive. These drives will continue to be 250 GB even if all the drives in the array have been switched to 400 GB. The easiest way to expand your array will be to add additional drives.
Click to expand...

Kinda figured this. I guess I was hoping that the controller would be smarter than I. And hey, any ingenious ideas on how to easily backup .75TB? That's a lot of DVDs.
 
In my experience with SCSI RAID 5 I have found that:

Some array controllers will let you add larger drives (will only use part of the drive at first) then expand the array to the unused space.

Almost all SCSI array controllers will let you create a new array on the unused space. (two RAID 5 partitions on the drives)

ATA RAID 5 though is usually less featured than SCSI.

==>Lazn
 
You'd need a card that supports Online Capacity Expansion, and i'm pretty sure the Promise controller won't do that.
Some of the new 3Ware's and LSI's will.
 
are you sure you are gona be able to put more then 3 drives in the sc420? i thought it only held 2 drives and had one free 5 1/4 slot?

at least the sc400's did.
 
slk32 said:
are you sure you are gona be able to put more then 3 drives in the sc420? i thought it only held 2 drives and had one free 5 1/4 slot?

at least the sc400's did.
Click to expand...

Hey man, where there's a will there's a way. I'll figure it out.

Saying that a card requires online capactiy expansion is definitely not correct. The promise card is advertised as having online capacity expansion. Has anyone actually tried to do what I am talking about? I'm sure that expensive SCSi arrays could do the trick, but that doesn't really apply to me. Cheap is the name of my game. But thanks to all for the info.
 
Many of the newer cards will allow for online array expansion, but none have the ability to expand the partition that is on the array. Partition Magic 8 has the ability to expand NTFS partitions but does not function in Win2003 server, so I was unable to test it. I had to backup the array, then re-partition.

I have used Partition Magic 8 to combine partitions under WinXP SP2 and it worked fine, did take forever however. My guess is it would work for the RAID array if not using Server OS. Read the features section on Norton's web site to be sure.
 
joecool234 said:
Hey man, where there's a will there's a way. I'll figure it out.

Saying that a card requires online capactiy expansion is definitely not correct. The promise card is advertised as having online capacity expansion. Has anyone actually tried to do what I am talking about? I'm sure that expensive SCSi arrays could do the trick, but that doesn't really apply to me. Cheap is the name of my game. But thanks to all for the info.
Click to expand...
some guy over at SR has tried it by adding another drive, it worked well. I am not linking, since i am not sure if x-linking to other forums is allowed.
 
drizzt81 said:
since i am not sure if x-linking to other forums is allowed.
Click to expand...

if undertaken in the spirit of information exchange and disemination its allowed
if on the otherhand its incitement, well we have had forum wars before and that never goes well for the participants on either side ;)

looks like most of the options have been covered

regarding backup of near a TB
consider that its only within the last couple of years that a TB has become "end consumer"
in the big leagues, arrays backup arrays, and then are written to hard media (generally tape in the past) at lesiure and automatically, with full backups varying from once a week to once a month and incremental backups nightly or even less

I employ multiple copies on redundant arrays on different boxes and burn DVDs & CDs
but then Im the sole user here, Big Files like Videos or graphics projects get full burned backup when they are done, small incremental data like email gets shuffled and updated around the network, same with "personal research information" and most freeware aps (which there are a ton of), I generally reburn categories of that every 3 to 6 months
(IE: all HDD info and aps)

beats actually loosing data
I just made a stupid pilot error again today (the leading cause of data loss)
I migrated components around again and when bringing my NAS online with a new config hooked up my USB keyboard and mouse via the KVM instead of my PS\2s
well I was booting into the Ultimate Boot CD and couldnt access anything, and couldnt shutdown, had to hard restart, and the RAID5 (SX6000) didnt like that it went critical, so now Im enduring hours of it reinitializing\synching and rebuilding the data :rolleyes:

beep, beep, beep........beep, beep, beep.........beep, beep, beep.......
 
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